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Thursday, January 24, 2013

The Monsterjunkies Book Review

The Monsterjunkies

By Erik Daniel Shein and L.M. Reker

The Monsterjunkie’s aren’t your typical family. They live on
an estate with “monsters” that Dr. Monsterjunkie has located throughout the
world. The “monsters” are really extremely rare creatures, in some cases
individuals. The estate has a reputation as being kind of odd. And if you’re a
sensitive teenage boy like Crow, the youngest of the Monsterjunkie children,
this reputation can be a problem at school. His older sister, Indigo, has a
different personality so the houses reputation doesn’t affect her, it’s the
secretiveness her parents, Talon and Pandora, insist on.

As the story in the book unfolds, Crow and Indigo begin to
grow up. Crow develops friendships with a group of with a group of boys who dub
themselves the Schnogginʹ Knocker’s. And Indigo encourages her parents to be
more open with the community about the families work with cryptozoology.

I really enjoyed reading this book. It is written for young
adults so it is easy to read. The fact
that family accepts and provides sanctuary to so many different individuals and
creatures really appealed to me. And it was fun to read about mythical creatures.
All of the characters in the book are interesting, but Beau, the Sasquatch, is
my absolute favorite. I loved how the writers took a creature from folklore and
presented him as an intelligent being who expresses his emotions articulately.

The overall theme of the book is bullying. Each individual in the book has faced
situations where they do not fit into what is called “normal” by the world they
live in. And each character solves the problem in their own manner. To me the
book really showed how bullying is really an action that is cultivated by
hatred. Bullying has its seeds in our cultures lack of acceptance of all
individuals in our society. And the author’s explore how our attitudes towards
the planet affect the people on the planet. Do we respect the lives of all
creatures on the planet, or do we believe that the planet is there simply for
our personal gain?

If you want to read a book that presents a positive ways to
deal with bullying on a small and large scale, The Monsterjunkies is the book
for you.